I Am Writing a Newsletter Post

I am currently sitting in an Airbnb in Spearfish, South Dakota. I am trying to write an email newsletter, because that is the challenge I made to myself in the early months of 2018, and I am trying to relate that to the one-hour mixtape I have already created, as if there’s any reason to start relating the words to the music after ignoring it for the past seven years. I am sitting at a table that is one inch too short, which matches the bed that I slept in last night (two inches too short) and the headboard of that same bed (one inch too tall). I am trying to turn this into a metaphor, but it is not working.

It doesn’t always work. Earlier this week, I tried to use our Christmas fog and resulting hoarfrost as a metaphor. Honestly, I thought it was a good one, and I followed that thread for a while. The fog represents anxiety or fear, in how everything feels claustrophobic, and the hoarfrost represents how the moisture from the fog fleetingly covers what’s real. Hoarfrost is striking and beautiful and weird and temporary — a simple wind or a few minutes of sunlight send hoarfrost into the abyss, exposing the structure that was always there. The fog lifts and the road remains, the buildings remain, the horizon remains. There’s a moral there, somewhere, about how anxiety and fear are counteracted by the stability we find in friends and family, but I couldn’t quite make it work. It doesn’t always work. That’s okay. Sometimes the ones that don’t work still make the email. Sometimes I just need to hit publish.

I am taking a break for a bit. I’m looking at my email, which I just looked at a few minutes ago. I am changing the song I am listening to. My back is a little sore; now it’s all I can focus on. I’m changing the song again — this time, it’s Sunn O))), a drone metal band that I’m not sure if I even like, but it drowns out the sounds from the Airbnb.

I am looking at last year’s newsletter posts, now. I’m trying to figure out what last year was all about — I see an email about the darkest ten weeks of the year, and a post about how everything goes away, and how I used to be embarrassed about liking Candlebox (I kind of still am) and a post about my cousin’s Super Nintendo that still wrecks me to read. I see ten emails from last year – this will be the eleventh – and remember that one month I couldn’t do it. I can’t even figure out the singular item within a “newsletter.” It’s like when old people say they “wrote a blog” when they actually mean they wrote a blog post. I am that old person now. I am going to call this a newsletter post.

This is my standard route when any writer’s block crops up. I look at what I already did and find the ruts, the grooves that I can fall back into, easily, simply, rehashing some weird quirk or talking at length about a topic with an audience of one. I shake it off. I get back to this Byword document.

I am typing again, but it’s not working. It’s frustrating for a second. I realize I have the caps lock on, and so I tap the caps lock button to turn it off and frustratingly miss it a few times, so when I type my word it’s all caps again and again, and even though I keep trying to hit the button it’s not working. Type type type; delete delete delete. I type fast, which also means I make mistakes faster than my mind can comprehend. I am angry; I am frustrated. It is the absolute smallest thing, but these small things are everything sometimes, and they always seem to send me over the edge, and so I stop and take a breath and realize that it’s not because of the caps lock, but because my fingers are one letter off of home row. I turn the caps lock off, look at my hands, and shift the left hand over by one key. I type, and it works. I feel relief. I feel solved. I feel healed. My words work again.

I am considering that my metaphor for the newsletter. It has to be. It doesn’t have to work.

I am surrounded by family. One of them just put away a sofa bed and is now watching Parks and Recreation. One is making biscuits and gravy. One is begrudgingly getting out of bed, eventually. It’s the slow movements of a nuclear family without any concrete plans, and there should be something peaceful about it but, in reality, I don’t know how I feel. I’m at an Airbnb in Spearfish, South Dakota, because we are touring a college with our oldest kid. We have already toured a college with our oldest kid, a few weeks ago, and it was incredible — a complex web of nostalgia for the college experience and anxiety about whether our oldest will feel comfortable and pride in seeing how she grasped and accepted and embraced the idea of being her own person, with her own plans, out in the open for everyone to see. My college experience was a haphazard mess of weird decisions, and for a while I thought that was my fault but I know now that adulthood is a haphazard mess of weird decisions and college gives you a few chances to mess up before you have to be your own responsible person. She’s going to do that. It’s going to be amazing.

It’s also going to be really really hard. Next year, at this time, the oldest kid will be at college. The youngest kid will be the only one at home to absorb our parental oversight. We’ll all need to start getting comfortable with one kid gone, because soon it will be two. I am thinking about that a lot right now. I do not know how much I like it, but I know that I cannot change it.

I am treading water with this newsletter, and I know that. I know that YOU know that. I know that it’s okay, and I know that YOU know that it’s okay. This is how it goes. This is how the mind works. I am writing like this because it’s how I’m thinking right now. I know that. I am okay with that.

I can smell the biscuits and gravy. They smell wonderful. I am happy that I have gotten these words down, because sometimes that’s all you can do, and I know I will feel wonderful once I’ve published this. Forgotten about this.

Because that’s how thoughts work. I tell my kids how important it is to write lists. To remove things from our head in any way we can, freeing up space to manage the world as it comes at us. That’s what this is, I guess, and I am thankful that I give myself the opportunity. I’m only doing this to impress myself, and sometimes it works. But, even when it doesn’t, it still works. We should all do this. We should all take time to figure out our own shit. We should all struggle to write.

I am scheduling this post to go out on December 31st. I am doing that because I am out of town, but when this post hits your inbox I’ll be nearly back home. I don’t know what I’ll be doing after this. I might listen to the mixtape again — I really enjoy the last song, which is called “Teenage Spaceship.” I especially enjoy that the band calls themselves “Fuck-Off Machete,” or at least they did when they were together the first time (they now use the more friendly F.O. Machete). I mostly enjoy that this comes as a recommendation from a friend in New Zealand, who I have not seen for many years, who always gives me recommendations after reading these newsletters. I know that these newsletters are fully masturbatory — an exercise in ego, a grasp for relevancy — but I am still doing them. Because I like making mixtapes. I like using writing to figure out my feelings. I like typing, and publishing, and forgetting.

The sun is fully up, and I am feeling better. I will go for a hike today. I will visit a college tomorrow, and see that college not only through my eyes, but through the eyes of a kid who is trying to make a decision, and through the eyes of another kid who still doesn’t know if he wants to make that decision in the first place. I will hold my family’s hands and I will talk about food service plans and we’ll laugh about the fact that the school mascot is a bee or something and then we’ll go eat some food that someone else will make for us. But for now, I’ll let this newsletter sit for a day and review it again tomorrow.

I am going to eat some breakfast now. Happy New Year.